Drowning in the Dark
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: [AU] Kouji only learnt about the lives of his mother and brother when they were dead, when buried things couldn't pass through the earth to the grave and had to come back up again. But just as neglecting the living leads to a death beyond sight, delving too deep into the lives of the dead can cause the soul to flake away inside.
1. Bleach

**A/N:** I'm not too sure about the rating for this one, so I'm following the "if in doubt, keep it M" rule. Some of the chapters might be a big graphic for some of you. I can't say all the warnings now either, since that also involves spoilers, but I'll try to give them chapter by chapter without spoiling too much (ouch, tall order).

_For this chapter, warning for a somewhat graphic description of a drowned body. Which naturally involves a dead body._

And now that that's out of the way, some less pressing matters. :D First, this is written for two challenges at the Digimon Fanfiction Challenges Forum (link's in my profile) – The Tale in Fragments Challenge (with 100 prompts, easy list 4), and the Mega Prompts Challenge, writing prompts 85 – write a multichip over 100 chapters. These are very short chapters (maximum of 800 words because of the first challenge), but they're chapters regardless. They'll tell a whole story when they're done, and taking a 100 prompts list was the easiest way to guarantee this story _will_ reach 100 chapters. :D And that I won't run out of stuff for it too. This also frames the…more gory details very nicely (if you consider this gore; I don't but I was outvoted by some old school friends on the matter).

The other thing before I throw you guys into the fic is the unspecified characters in this first chapter. If you couldn't guess from the summary or the characters listed, it'll be obvious by the last line – and if it's not, think back to Frontier canon. Which one of the twins fits closer into that last line?

And that's all from me. Future authors notes will hopefully not be as long. Enjoy. :D

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**Drowning in the Dark  
1. Bleach**

He'd always thought of drowning as some foolish sweet death: an escape from the monotone they claimed bled them dry, where the dark water could bury it all. He always thought of it as painless, like fog stifling one's senses and lulling them into eternal sleep. He always thought of it as poetic, beautiful in that the empty shell left behind was white and perfectly plastic like a doll.

That was before he saw what it really was, what sort of corpse it really left behind. Eyes not closed in acceptance, willingness and peace, but rather open, glassy and empty and yet somehow full of fear and desperation before they froze. No-one had been kind enough to close them. Not then. His own hand had come shaking forward, but it had fallen; he'd backed away and crashed into the cart before someone noticed and took away that sight.

They covered the body too, but not before the image had been burnt into his mind. Not pale and perfect skin but eyes and nose and mouth were tinged with blue – a dark blue he didn't thing was natural on a human body. But apparently it was, when that body was so desperately starved for its oxygen. And it wasn't so smooth and perfect like a marker someone had used to paint, but something horrible and indistinguishable and unarguably real.

And that blue blotched the skin as well: specks that had no sense, no pattern, stitched in white red – and the bleached pallor he'd imagined would be there was only in those eyes, and even that was lined with streaks of dilute red. _That_ looked fake, like someone had used a red pen with fading ink, the sort that went almost pink and skipped a few strokes without fail.

No, that wasn't true. There was more white: a thin line of foam between lax lips, mixed with water trickling torturously slow. Or maybe that was just the water that clung to the body still, the water of Tokyo Bay that had taken more than its fair share of romantic suicides and had now been exposed as the monster it really was. All of that was gone now; he was alone, in the dark, but that image was still there: a face, blue and red and dead with an expression of desperation and fear fixed upon it. Immortalised. He shivered as it stole his sight again. In the darkness, there wasn't even anything else to distract him. At least the clinging salt and algae dragged into the hospital's inherent antiseptic smell had blocked his nose. The image alone had been so brutal he didn't know what he would have done if smell – or, God forbid, _touch_ – had accompanied it.

And that was just the face; the rest of the body had been covered with a white sheet, slowly soaked.

It was a thief, that body. It had stolen all the anger he'd meant to unleash, the hatred he'd meant to cling to stubbornly until his resolve failed, the questions he'd meant to ask, the shock he'd meant to struggle against until it crumbled by his hands. It had stolen his disillusion, his ignorance – and to think, his first meeting with his brother was with a dead body keeping his name.


	2. Absorbed

**A/N:** _Warnings for this chapter: a little bit more on the way of dead body descriptions (not as graphic as the first chapter) and Kouji throwing up at some inexact time._

Enjoy. :D

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**Drowning in the Dark  
2. Absorbed**

There were two separate incidences, two separate deaths. He'd forgotten about his mother's. Maybe it was because he'd reconciled himself to her apparent death already – a death which had been, then, a lie. It was so easy to forget those few words when he had a strong memory that opposed it.

But no-one had ever said anything about a brother, so that had stuck out like a sore thumb in his mind. That was what he remembered when he woke up at home, sticky and uncomfortable under a too warm blanket and a dried out cloth over his eyes and something scratching stubbornly in his throat. He remembered that body that resembled a badly painted plastic sculpture: not that perfect wax doll he'd always imagined but something…ugly, wrong – intolerable, and yet still a picture in his mind. A deformed picture yes: fuzzy and inexact and too bright to see in far too many places – but a picture nonetheless.

Maybe it was because he never did see his mother's body in the end, but he only saw her portrait: a little faded with age but smiling, softly smiling, behind his eyes when she was mentioned. And he felt all the usual things because he'd believed her to be dead before anyway: sadness, some desire, a bit of anger… But when they mentioned his brother it was that image that had burned itself, incomplete, into his mind, and it was crushing him.

Sometimes it was enough to compress the contents into a tiny fluid ball he could choke on until it spewed out of his mouth along with the bile accompanying it. Sometimes it took the rest of the world out of focus, like looking under a microscope at a poorly made slide: the sort that seemed to have two layers and focusing on one always made the other one indistinct. And then he'd find he'd stumbled into something when a stinging shoulder or palm dragged him back, or he'd fallen against someone when their too hot bodies scorched him through his shirt. But other times it was out of context, without a mention of anything that should remind him, and he would just look at the picture and think about just how _wrong_ it looked.

But he didn't know what the brother – not _his_ brother yet because that part still floated about like a rock in a small cup, banging on the glass but never ever turning into the water itself – _should_ look like, so he really couldn't say what "right" was.


	3. Wipe

**A/N:** _Warnings for this chapter: hmm…nothing really. Just a line that sums up the much more graphic description in the first chapter if that counts any._

Enjoy. :D

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**Drowning in the Dark  
3. Wipe**

His picture of his mother's gotten a little dusty he thought, and he grabbed a cloth and started rubbing at the picture-frame glass. It's a mindless task, but right now those sorts of tasks seem like the only ones he can occupy himself with, because otherwise other _things_ creep in and he loses a little more of his life trying to climb away from those slippery sloping walls.

And that picture was something old and familiar to him. It didn't go out of focus or change because he'd learnt something new about her, because he'd been told almost ten years ago she'd died of some chronic illness and he was told just days ago the same thing. The only thing that changed was the time: wasted time because he'd never met her, never seen her, never talked to her…

He just had that photo, that picture of his mum that was already looking a little peaky under the sad quality of the photograph. He'd kept it in that frame for the nine years he'd had it, but that didn't stop the ageing process. That didn't stop it becoming a little more washed out by the day, even if he didn't touch the picture itself, just the glass that protected it and the frame that held it all together.

That didn't stop his mother from having wasted away like that, regardless of _when _it had happened because he could muster up as much of that anger that had leaked away from him as he wanted but it wouldn't change a thing. His mother having been alive all those years didn't change a thing – except he now had a grave to go to.

A grave he didn't think he _could_ go to, because that wasted photograph was about all he could tolerate right now. Because the image of his mother slowly becoming whiter and pinker instead of all those darker colours like deep red and navy blue. And he was sure he'd hate that later, but at that point he was still unsteady on his feet and in his dreams and ordered to stay at home – and he didn't really care about that order because there wasn't anywhere else he _wanted_ to be anyway.

And he could stare at that photo of his mother all he wanted, stare at it and forget that other death, that other face he couldn't stare at properly because he didn't know how it should look. Not like him: he wouldn't accept that answer whether someone said it to him or not. Not like him, otherwise his own face would become an unbearable thing: bloated and blue and foaming in the mirror's depths.

But it was impossible to lie so easily, and he'd always been a bad liar. That's why he'd hid behind anger. That's why he was a badly sown patchwork quilt without the pins, since the pins were gone.


	4. Wish

**A/N:** _Warnings for this chapter: nothing in my opinion, and I tend to err on the side of caution considering my background._

Enjoy. :D

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**Drowning in the Dark  
4. Wish**

A few days after his nice perfect world is shredded to pieces – and never mind it was only that after he'd padded it thickly with anger-filled fat – his father comes back from somewhere and hands him a box.

'They're…' The man gives a heavy sigh, before removing the lid and showing face down photos, a few video cassettes and some other stuff. 'Mementos,' he finishes. 'From your mother's apartment.'

Kouji did not look at the box. If there was a face-up photo he didn't want to see it, or the expression on his father's face.

'Are you..?' He could hear his father shuffling his feet on the carpet like an awkward child. 'Are you feeling better?'

Kouji shrugged. The glass that encased his mother's picture was shining in the morning sun, showing even more crudely where the print had faded away from age. But his memory could fill in the gaps. He'd had that photo since he'd been five or six; now he was fourteen and, if he had any talent at drawing or painting, could replicate that entire image from memory alone: better than the original that had wilted away with time.

But he didn't have that talent to make such memories everlasting. He couldn't even keep his perfect pictures in his mind.

He hadn't even had a perfect picture of his mother. That once upon a time image had already captured the flaws of her body and her soul, the sickness that slowly ate her from the inside out.

His eyes drifted back to the box. Maybe there was something better in there, something that showed her true face – and the true face of that brother so he could rewrite that one still in his mind. There, like a bad itch that always came back when remembered, worse than before, except not worse because experience too had grown, and he shut his eyes tight and tried to overwrite it with how it _should_ have looked…but all he had to replace it with was a badly focused image of his own face.


	5. Welcome

**A/N:** _Warnings for this chapter: some disrespect to a dead woman's photograph…but you'll have to forgive Kouji here because he doesn't know._

Enjoy. :D

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**Drowning in the Dark  
5. Welcome**

When he woke up again it was mid-afternoon and his father was nowhere to be seen. The box was still there though, sitting innocently on his desk in the soft glow that forced its way past the now drawn curtains. The lid was off and he could see the face down photos there. Other stuff too. Video cassettes he would need to go downstairs to watch. A folder he'd need to open before he could see its contents. A few envelopes, sealed, he'd have to tear apart to see what it contained. Some CDs he'd need to put into a computer to read.

He turned his head away, but there was nothing that could steal his mind on the wall. That was just a blank slate, not quite white because the last time it had been painted was two years back and age had made it that way. It was still easy though, easy to draw upon like a canvas that had been worn away under the sun so that the paint brush slid across its smooth surface instead of caught on the rough bumps from the new. He turned quickly away, and it was back into the view of that box again.

He slowly sat up, reached for it before letting his hands fall, then reached for it again. He didn't want to see those photos, he didn't, but at the same time he wanted to rewrite those images in his mind and he needed those photos to do it. Ghosts were supposed to be a little transparent yes, but unchanging through time but his had faded, gotten further away, with age. And dolls, empty caskets that no longer clung to their soul, were supposed to be pretty, plastic things that were without their life but otherwise unharmed, untouched. They shouldn't spoil like too-ripe apples or over-fried sweet potatoes or bread that soaked up far too much water and mould.

He grabbed at the box before he could change his mind again, like a dying man whose only source of nourishment was his own flesh and blood. A state where even the most abhorrent act was perfectly reasonable, and yet there was still that reluctance that held him back from trying to save his life.

But with the first photo in his hands that restraint was gone, and with a fever he'd long since not possessed he flipped it over and stared hard – then gave a cry of disappointment and tossed it on the floor.

He didn't know _who_ that old woman was, but it couldn't possibly be his mother.


End file.
